A UICC (Universal Integrated Circuit Card) is a smartcard with an embedded processor and storage which securely stores the cellular subscriber information and authentication information and which runs an application to identify the subscriber to the cellular network. The UICC supports a number of applications including a GSM 11.11 Subscriber Identity Module—Mobile Equipment (SIM-ME) application to allow connection to a 2G GSM cellular network and a 3GPP TS 31.102 Universal Subscriber Identity Module (USIM) application to allow connection to a 3G UMTS cellular network. In addition the UICC supports the GSM 11.14 SIM Application Toolkit for the Subscriber Identity Module—Mobile Equipment and is also capable of supporting the 3GPP TS 31.103 IP Multimedia Services Identification Module (ISIM) application to allow identification and authentication to the 3GPP Release 5 IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) and to support the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP). The UICC card is specific to the GSM and UMTS 3GPP cellular networks, but other types of SIM card are also in use for other types of cellular network.
Details of such UICC cards and other SIM cards, and the relevant authentication and encryption procedures, will be familiar to a person skilled in the art.